28 Feb 2015

A trip to
Dhahran golf course to see if I could see the Long-tailed Shrike and the three
species of Kingfisher that had been present produced neither Long-tailed
Shrike, Pied Kingfisher or White-throated Kingfisher but did turn up a few
interesting water-birds on the small pond. The female Common Kingfisher was
still present hunting from the reed bed and alongside it at one stage was a
nice male Little Bittern. There is a good chance the Little Bitterns are
nesting at this site as we caught a female Little Bittern at Sabkhat Al Fasl
two weeks ago that had a brood patch and probably had eggs as well. Other
interesting birds were a few Great Cormorants including one drying it’s wings
whilst standing on a concrete fountain built in the pond. Also sitting on this
structure as well as fishing in the pond was a white phase juvenile Indian Reef
Heron. There were very few other birds of note although a small number of
Pallid Swifts were flying overhead. The trip was short as this is a restricted
area so the good birds mentioned above may still be present somewhere.

27 Feb 2015

I saw and adult
summer Great Black-headed Gull Larus ichthyaetus fly over whilst birding Sabkhat Al Fasl
and it flew and landed in an area of dry sabkha. It landed with a group of
other gulls which turned out to include one further adult summer and seven
second calendar year Great Black-headed Gulls. There were also five Steppe
Gulls in the group. Sabkhat Al Fasl has turned out to be a good site to see the
species in the last four years with birds seen each winter although this group
is the largest I have seen so far in Saudi Arabia. The Great Black-headed Gull is an
uncommon winter visitor to the
Arabian Gulf and southern Red Sea coastal areas that is also rarely seen
inland. The first birds are normally not seen until December or January, with
March probably the best time to see the species. Apart from Sabkhat Al Fasl the
other good location for seeing the species is the causeway to Bahrain where
birds can often be seen hanging in the wind over the road.

26 Feb 2015

Nicole, Harald and I went
ringing at Sabkhat Al Fasl for the first time in three weeks as the wind has
been too strong recently to ring. We caught mostly the same birds as migration
is only just starting but we did catch our first migrant Caspian Reed Warblers
and Sedge Warblers. Both these species have arrived early this year with the
first Caspian Reed Warblers heard in late January. Sedge Warblers normally do
not arrive until March so they are here earlier than expected. Both these
species should be caught in larger numbers over the next few weeks until they
peak in April. Other warblers caught include a few Common Chiffchaffs that will
be declining in numbers over the next few weeks to be replaced by Willow
Warblers and plenty of resident Indian (Clamorous) Reed Warblers that are
singing in force for various places. Other birds caught included good numbers
of Red-spotted Bluethroats, Common Kingfishers, a male Little Bittern, a Water
Pipit and a Daurian Shrike. We caught a total of thirty birds during the
mornings ringing and if we could work out a way of trapping the White Wagtails
and Water Pipits that were around the nets in good number we could catch many
more. The last two species can see the nets and fly over or around them and are
only ever caught if flushed from close range into the nets and even then they
normally avoid the nets.

25 Feb 2015

Citrine WagtailMotacilla
citreolawas until the last
few years ascarce
winter visitor to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, but more birds are now
being seen making it an uncommon winter visitor and passage migrant. Birds are
mainly seen from September until March with some adult birds amongst those seen
in early spring. Whilst birding at Sabkhat Al Fasl last weekend we found a
Citrine Wagtail in fine plumage. As with most Citrine Wagtails the bird was not
easy to photograph as it was mainly in an area of cover next to the waters
edge. It did show occasionally as it was being chased by a White Wagtail that
at ne stage flushed the bird onto the top of the reeds allowing one photographed
to be grabbed. Sabkhat Al Fasl is a good place to look for this species in
winter and I have seen two different birds in the last two weekends there. They
are quite secretive and appear to like shrubs near to the water, such as small
Tamarisk bushes.

24 Feb 2015

The Desert Hyacinth (Cistanche
tubulosa) is a widely distributed annual that produces a dense pyramid
spike of bright yellow flowers topped by maroon-tinted buds. The yellow flowers
do not smell very nice and flies are attracted to the smell and carry the
pollen on their legs from plant to plant helping with pollination. The many
tiny seeds may remain dormant for years until the roots of the host plant are
close enough to trigger germination. It is one of the showiest plants of
Eastern Arabia with bright yellow, dense column of flowers sometimes
approaching one metre in height. It has varying flower colour with the flowers
either tightly packed in the spike or loose. They are widespread on sandy or
sandy-silty ground and can tolerate saline environments as well as disturbed
conditions, so are often seen growing near roads or tracks in the desert or
along the shores of the Arabian Gulf. They are parasitic, one of several such
plants in Arabia, and live off other plants to gain their nutritional needs, as
they have no green parts or leaves to synthesise chlorophyll directly. These
photographs were taken at Sabkhat Al Fasl on 24 January 2015 where they were
growing on some disturbed soil near my ringing site.

23 Feb 2015

I went birding to Sabkhat Al
Fasl as it was too windy for ringing and although we did not see anything out
of the ordinary we did see a good mix of winter visitors and migrants. Winter
visitors included Greater Spotted Eagles, Common Kingfishers, European
Stonechats (although this bird may have been an early migrant) and Red-spotted
Bluethroats. Other winter birds included Great Cormorant and Pied Avocet. Most
of these birds will be feeding up now to get ready for their long migrations
north to their breeding grounds. Migrants included Yellow Wagtail, Barn Swallow
and Little Ringed Plover all of which are early migrants through the Eastern
Province of Saudi Arabia. One Barn Swallow had very rufous underparts suggesting it may have been a different subspecies to the ones we normally get. A few of the resident species were also seen with
good numbers of Purple Swamphens and Little Grebes in particular.

22 Feb 2015

Whilst birding
at the weekend I saw a flock of Red-rumped Swallows with a few Barn Swallows
mixed in over the power station. The species breeds in the southwest highlands
and locally in central Arabia, but is an uncommon migrant elsewhere. They are early spring migrants with birds
seen most years in February and numbers peaking in March with the last records
in mid-April. Numbers are much reduced in autumn passage with only a few birds
seen and rarely flocks like those that occur in spring and birds occurring from
August to October. There are a handful of records in the winter months of
November, December and January but they are scarce during this period. The
birds were the first ones I have seen this spring and numbered about 15 birds.
These birds are always difficult to photograph due to their quick flight action
and rapid movements but I managed to take a few shots shown below. The flock
was still present the next day in the same area but birds like this tend not to
stay around very long particularly in the spring.

21 Feb 2015

The nominate subspecies
C. r. rudis that occurs from central and southern Turkey and Israel to
Syria, Iraq and southwest Iran as well as northern Egypt, Nile Valley and
sub-Saharan Africa is the subspecies present in Dhahran. These are told by their distinctive medium-size and black and white plumage lacking any black spots on the flanks and side
of the throat which is shown by the two other nearby subspecies that are also
blacker in plumage tones. Pied Kingfishers generally use small and large lakes,
large rivers, estuaries, coastal lagoons, mangroves and sandy and rocky coasts
and require waterside perches such as trees, reeds, fences and posts. They eat
predominantly fish and regularly hover particularly so in windy
conditions. Birds fly low over the water with steady wing beats and then rise
2–10 metres in the air, with body held nearly vertical, bill held down and
wings beating rapidly; they then dive down into the water and if successful swallow
prey on the wing without beating on branch or something similar. Birds are generally
sedentary. In non-breeding season, local movements can extend over several hundreds
of kilometres and this is probably how birds enter the Eastern Province. The
bird in Dhahran spends a lot of time hovering over the water trying to catch
fish and occasionally sits on top of acacia trees to rest and is frequenting a
small pond with reed fringed edges on Dhahran golf course. The bird may well
have been around for most of the winter but as no one birdwatcher the golf
course as it is out of bounds the kingfisher remained unfound. Since its
discovery on 13 February 2015 it has been seen each day in the same location
although does go missing for considerable amounts of time. The bird is a female
as it only has a single breast band whereas males have two bands.

20 Feb 2015

A
Long-tailed Shrike was glimpsed briefly on the golf course at Dhahran on 14
February but the view was so brief it was put down as a Daurian Shrike. On 17
February Harald Ris re-found the bird in the same place and confirmed its
identification as a Long-tailed Shrike. The grey mantle with no visible rufous
and the lack of white-wing patch on my views of the bird from photos on my
I-phone led me to wonder if the bird may be a Grey-backed Shrike but on seeing
it myself on the 18 February it soon became clear it was a Long-tailed Shrike a
new species for the Saudi Arabian list. The subspecies that have occurred in
other parts of Arabia are L. s. erythronotus that
breeds in southeast Kazakhstan, southern Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, southern
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan eastwards to north and
north-central India and probably also northeast Iran. This is the most likely
subspecies to occur due to its location to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia
but the lack of any real rufous on the mantle makes the bird we saw look more
like L. s. caniceps that occurs in north-central & peninsular India
and N Sri Lanka. To confuse things further the mainland subspecies tend to
intergrade with each other. The fact that erythronotus is migratory,
wintering from October to March in the Indian plains and caniceps
appears to make only local seasonal movements makes it almost certain our bird
is in fact L. s. erythronotus. Long-tailed Shrike is a medium-sized
shrike with a very long, graduated tail. They have a black facial mask extending
as a broad band through the lores and eye to lower nape with the crown to
mantle dark grey and the back and rump rufous. They also have the upperwing
blackish, tertials edged pale buffish-white and a conspicuous, although small,
white patch at base of primaries. The tail is black, tipped white with the
outer tail fetahers edged pale buff. The throat is white and the underparts
whitish, strongly tinged with rufous on the breast side and flanks. Races
differ mainly in size (nominate largest), tail length, and colour of head and
upperparts with erythronotus similar
to nominate but distinctly smaller, somewhat duller, and with narrower black
band on forehead with caniceps paler,
with less rufous on upperparts. They favour open country with scrub, light
woodland and bushes, mainly in cultivated areas and feed on a wide variety of
insects such as grasshoppers and beetles as well as small mammals, lizards and
frogs that they hunt from a prominent perch. The bird in Dhahran was always on
the move and was quite timid not allowing close approach.

Saudi Arabia Flag

OSME Region

Google Translator

About The Blog

I hope you enjoy browsing my latest images & notes from the field, the majority are from Dhahran (eastern Saudi Arabia) as well as bird ringing in Bahrain. Most of the photographs are of birds but I will also include other interesting natural history shots when I take them.

About The Photographs

I am an amateur photographer who goes birdwatching and takes the occasional picture with birdwatching being my primary interest. I do birdwatch in an area that has good light for photogrpahy and manage to take quite a few photographs each day.

All photos on this blog are copyright and may not be copied or reproduced without my permission. Please ask if you would like to use any of my photographs for any reason.